Day 13: Riding my Bicycle

Naturally, I still felt tipsy and disoriented when I woke up the next day around noon. I went out to breakfast at El Terrible Juan Cafe with a girl from South Africa who had gone out with us last night. Returning to the hostel, it didn't take me long to lie back down in bed and sip on water until the afternoon.

I decided what would do me some good would be to expend some energy, so I took out a bicycle that the hostel provides for free to guests and rode it east, down the separated bike lane along Calle Manuel Lopez Cotilla. I made it to a quaint park, Parque Revolución, where I stopped to sit and enjoy my surroundings.

The "dedicated bike lane" that Google claims to continue to run down Av. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla definitely does not exist, and I didn't feel like trying my luck all the way down to the city center, so I rode down to Av. de la Paz and over to La Cafétaria for dinner.

After dinner I rode back to the hostel to pack my things and tried to suppress the Friday night festivities and get some sleep. Luckily, the rain outside the dorm room windows drowned out most of the noise. 

Day 12: What Happens in Mexico Stays in Mexico, Especially Teeth

After breakfast at El Terrible Juan Cafe, I decided to do some more shopping. This time at nearby Centro Magno.

I ended up buying some very nice formal pants for about 15 USD each and some jeans that were somewhat expensive, about 35 USD (which, now that I'm rereading this blog post a month later, were 110% worth the price. I've worn them nearly everyday since getting back to Seattle). The man running the store where I bought the jeans was really friendly and talkative. He had lived in the US for a while, working near Sacramento at a Jelly Belly factory before returning to Mexico with his wife to start a family. His amiability may have influenced my decision to go a little overboard on the frugal shopping trip I was trying to achieve, but the pants are quite nice and were definitely worth the (for Mexico, relatively) high price. Unfortunately, my bag now has about 5 lbs of clothes in it that are completely unsuited for my next destination, tropical Roatan, Honduras 😆

In the evening, I went on the weekly pub crawl hosted by the hostel. The area we are in, Chapultepec, is known mostly for its large selection of bars and clubs, so we were within easy walking distance of many places.

After having a few beers from Bar Mex Wey with hostel friends, the pub crawl warmed up with a few tequila shots and we set out for our first destination, Rock It.

I came to Mexico hoping to hear a lot of Latin rhythms, but it turns out that Mexicans really love American Rock & Roll.

While there, it started dumping rain outside. We waited about an hour, but the rain didn't abate and we were made to walk to the next club in a downpour, soaking our shoes, socks, and clothes in the process.

This place even had a live band consisting of some mariachi-esque instruments. (I recall there being a trumpet, tuba, and drums).

For some reason I thought it would be funny to take about half a dozen selfies with this guy from Mumbai

Next stop... well, actually I can't remember where we ended up next. I didn't take any photos so there isn't any metadata I can rely on. I do remember it was a small nightclub and I had way too much fun dancing my ass off.

Afterwards, we stopped by the hostel, which is when my night should have ended, but poor decisions were made and I went with a few others to a nightclub where legend has it your night will always end if you stay up too late partying in the Chapultepec area, Bar Americas.

I was swinging pretty loose by this time and at some point during the festivities I grabbed a beer bottle, went to take a drink, and chipped my front tooth. The tooth bit went off somewhere onto the club floor and I was in no state of mind to go looking for it.

Whoops

This is actually the exact same tooth bit that I had chipped off as a child while ice skating. When that happened, perhaps 15 years ago, we were able to (incredibly) find the tooth bit on the ice rink and get it "glued" back in by a dentist. Then again, while in high school, about 7-8 years ago, I was playing the silent game in a pool with some friends and we were trying to make each other laugh by doing silly things. One of my friends spun around with his arms out and smacked the tooth bit out of my mouth. It landed on the white concrete of the pool floor. The ensuing search was only exacerbated by the refractions of the sun through the water. Amazingly, we found the tooth bit in that situation as well and had it glued back in. That tooth bit has been trying to get out of my skull for the past decade and a half and it finally succeeded in a place that I will never, ever find it again -- a nightclub in Guadalajara, Mexico.

At least now I can tell people that there will always be a part of me in Mexico. 

I soon left the nightclub and surrounded myself with plenty of water before passing out on my bed, around 4:30 AM.

Day 11: Bar Mex Wey

In the morning I went back to El Terrible Juan Cafe. Turns out that was more or less un terrible idea because the wifi was ungodly slow that morning. I left after an hour and went back to La Cafetaria. Around 3 PM I had completed my main tasks for the 3-day block of remote work I had planned and I went back to the hostel to drop off my things.

I then took an Uber all the way out to Centro Comercial Galerías.

After arriving and exiting the Uber among a torrential downpour, I bought myself a wall plug USB charger (I had forgotten mine at home and the first hostel I stayed at had had USB wall outlets). I also bought a few pounds worth of clothes, since this would be one of my last days to buy cheap clothing in Mexico.

Returning to the hostel, I found that they had opened up the hostel bar, Bar Mex Wey. The bar faces the front patio area of the hostel and is open to the public. I met some young locals that lived here in Guadalajara. While most people in Guadalajara speak at least some English, the younger generations are particularly comfortable conversing in English, which makes it very easy for someone like me (i.e., terrible Spanish speaking skills) to make friends with them.

I met a man my age who was originally from Colombia but had traveled the world before settling in Guadalajara recently. He was convinced robots would take over the world by 2030 and that everyone would spend their newly found free time traveling the world. I eventually settled in with a group of locals who were sitting around a table in the hostel's back patio area. They were very welcoming and I had a great time with them, staying up until 2 AM drinking and laughing.

Days 9 and 10: Cafe Hopping and Lucha Libre

Monday morning I walked five minutes from the hostel to El Terrible Juan Cafe.

It's a cozy and lush cafe with both indoor seating and outdoor patio seating within a garden. The drinks and food here were more "artsy" than the other cafes I would visit. I worked there until around 3 PM at which point my brain was about to explode and I left for the hostel.

People had seemed a bit cold at the hostel since I first arrived (I like to think that they just weren't as comfortable speaking English as I was) and I didn't make my first friend until later that evening, a girl from Mexico who loved cartoons. We watched Adventure Time together on the hostel's television in the common area.

On Tuesday morning, I went to Cafe Europa.

Cafe Europa sits along a busier and more touristy street. They had a decent promotion running that I took advantage of — 50 pesos for an americano and croissant.

In the afternoon I went to La Cafetaria.

La Cafetaria was my favorite of all the cafes I visited, though it may have primarily been due to the fact that they were the only place with decent internet speeds. The intersection the cafe sits upon is only moderately noisy, and plants and flowers abound throughout the outdoor patio seating and within the restaurant itself. The food here is very tasty and cheap and they have a decent selection of coffees and a good selection of teas. I worked until about 7 PM before returning to the hostel.

There was a lucha libre event that night hosted by the hostel, and at 8:30 PM we Uber'd over to the hostel's second, centro location. They warmed us up with a free round of tequila and we walked five minutes to Arena Coliseo.

Lucha Libre is definitely an experience to have if you ever visit Mexico proper. There are two distinct seating sections, a lower, ground-floor section and a stadium seating section behind a fence which circumscribes the lower section. Both sections encircle and center upon the lucha libre ring. Naturally, seats in the lower section cost a bit more than the further, upper section, so an activity that both sections expend a lot of energy on is chanting insults at each other. I didn't understand anything they were saying, but from asking around later it seems the upper section makes fun of the lower section for being "below" them, both literally and metaphorically, and the lower sections make fun of the upper sections for being poor, wishing they too could be in the lower section, etc. It's all in good fun, of course. No one is insulting seriously or on a personal level.

I didn't get any good quality videos of the actual wrestling, but it's not difficult to find videos of matches online.

The wrestling itself is pretty fantastical, in the same vein as WWE wrestling in the USA. Supposedly the outcome is predetermined and there are overarching story lines that run across multiple nights of matches. The history and symbolism of lucha libre within Mexico is rich and multi-faceted and I can't pretend to know much about it.

Afterwards, most of our group went out to the bars, but myself and one other girl had plans tomorrow (I had one more day of remote working) and we took an Uber back to our hostel around 12 AM.

Day 8: To Guadalajara

My flight to GDL didn't leave until 3:55 PM, so I allowed myself to join the walking tour put on each day at 10:35 AM by our hostel, somewhat ironically on my very last day in Mexico City. We walked to Avenida 20 de Deciembre and up around the Catedral Metropolitana.

Somehow I never realized that the unearthed ruins of Temple Mayor, the main Aztec temple, are located just to the east of the giant cathedral, which I'd seen just about every day during my time here. This is why you do the walking tour!

We saw Palacio de Bellas Artes and the inside of the opposing post office before ending the tour at an upstairs bar located along Avenida 5 de Mayo, one of the main walking streets.

One last look at Palacio de Bellas Artes

Returning to the hostel I had plenty of time to gather my things and get on the metro back to MEX. My flight to GDL left two hours late. There's a nice feature on flightaware.com that if you search for your flight number it will tell you the average delay of that flight. This specific flight left, on average, over an hour late. Had I known that I probably would have tried to show up at the gate just 20-30 minutes in advance rather than more than an hour.

Arriving in Guadalajara, I took an Uber to my hostel, Hostel Hospedarte Chapultepec.

It's warmer and greener in Guadalajara than in Mexico City. I'm planning on working remotely for the next three days, taking advantage of events in the evening, then having Thursday and Friday completely open before flying to Roatan, Honduras on Saturday.